DO YOU ALWAYS HAVE TO ACT LIKE AN ANIMAL?

Blog number sixty-seven                                    10 Jan. 2006

So I'm reading this book about first person accounts of fighter dogfights and one of the stories is about a guy flying an F-84 Thunderjet during the Korean War.  His oxygen mask malfunctions and his two wingmen see his plane doing some weird maneuvers.  At one point it took a hard turn to the right and went into a steep dive.

At first they think the pilot is practicing evasive action or something but then they see his head is leaning forward against the canopy.  Before they can call to him, they see him slump forward.  One of the pilots tells the other to put his wingtip under one wing and he would put his wingtip under the other wing without touching and they would use the flow of air over their wingtips to keep the unconscious pilot's plane level until they got to a lower altitude.  They got down to 13,000 feet and the pilot woke up with no memory of the fifteen minutes he had been unconscious, but with a severe headache.

Thinking outside the box, eh?
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I was watching a program on the telly (OTT) about gorillas.  The people doing the filming wanted to introduce an orphan baby gorilla to the pack, but they were afraid the adult gorilla might injure the infant.  Nervously, they approach the pack with the baby in hand.  As soon as they got close enough for the gorillas to smell the infant, the adults started acting nervous, huddling together as if conferencing and the baby started crying.  Suddenly the main gorilla - a hulking silverback, charged the guy carrying the baby gorilla and in slow motion later, it is seen that the silverback snatched the baby from the man and threw it into the bushes and then charged the man, teeth exposed.  The guy said he was sure he was gong to die, but the gorilla never touched him.

When the men backed off, the silverback approached the baby, picked it up, took it over to the packand last seen, all the group surrounded the baby, making a fuss over it, welcoming it into the group, it seemed to me. 

I was struck by how fearful the humans were about the expected reaction of the gorillas, thinking the gorillas might kill the baby, as opposed to the actual reaction. 

I had some years before become very aware of the intelligence and "humanity" that emanated from a zoo gorilla's eyes and was very touched by the experience.

Years later I saw a film about a boy that fell into a gorilla's cage.  One gorilla went over to the boy and very tenderly picked it up and took it to where the keepers could retrieve it.  The zoo keepers were kinda panic-stricken and rushed at the gorilla with water hoses trying to make it put the boy down.  I was sure, from previously seeing how they reacted to the baby gorilla, that the gorilla that picked up the boy knew he was injured and that he was human and wanted to give him to the humans to take care of.

The humans in this case reacted from fear of the gorilla injuring the boy just as the silverback had reacted to the humans carrying the baby gorilla out of fear of the humans hurting the baby gorilla.  How similar both experiences were, but from very different specie's viewpoint.

I once saw a series of pictures in Life Magazine where a crocodile had grabbed hold of an antelope by the stomach and there was a picture of a hippo charging toward the two -- one picture showing the hippo with all four feet off the ground.  The antelope got away from the croc and ran several feet away before it collapsed, but the croc was coming out of the water after it. The hippo got there in time to drive the croc back into the water, but by then the antelope was dead and the last picture showed the hippo with the antelopes head held tenderly in its mouth.

Amazing, no?

I once saw, again OTT,  a bull elephant chasing a group of people in an open jeep.  The people were obviously scared, but also laughing.  One of them said later that after viewing the film, he had no idea they were so close to being trampled.  Personally, I think the elephant just wanted to scare them away and had no intention of injuring them.  I think on one level, the humans knew this and in the moment responded to that knowledge with a scary thrill rather then a fearsome dread,

My daughter once told me about teasing a horse that belonged to her friend.  The two girls were stealing the hay from a pile the horse was eating.  At one point, my daughter told me later, the horse went after her with bared teeth and she was really scared the horse was going to injure her, but of course it didn't.  It just wanted to scare her and make her quit her behavior like sometimes we scare a dog if it is doing something we don't like.
                                              
I once saw OTT, a baby hippo walking on the heads of a packed bunch of huge crocodiles.  I wondered what kind of behavior the mother hippo took to teach those crocs to behave themselves like that.
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I once wanted to be a chemical engineer.  Since an engineering degree required drafting, I enrolled in a drafting class.  A few days into the course, a fellow student sidled up to me and advised that I would have to be neater in my work.  I looked at what I had done with "new eyes" and saw an ink-stained mess. I figured that if a student felt impelled to mentor poor me, I had better drop the class.  So I did.